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Enough, already: why humanity must get on board with the concept of ‘sufficiency’
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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I dunno man. If you look at aboriginal peoples around the globe who still live by their old native ways like in the Amazons, in isolated parts of Asia, Africa and Australia, and how American natives used to live, I'd say they were doing pretty well before western colonization happened. Greedy fuckers would get put in their place pretty quick or cast out of their collectivity for having antisocial behavior that is typically associated with greedy people.
The greed that we know today, historically speaking, is fairly recent. With its money and loans and debt and accumulation of wealth.
So no. I disagree with your argument that it is a problem with humanity. It's a problem with a system that's been built over time by a small group of people who were craving power.
Your analysis is certainly pretty easy on you personally, though, isn't it? Someone else is to blame, move on. Whenever you take part in modern society - eating meat, driving and flying, buying junk and throwing it away, everything basically - it's someone else's fault, move on. Personally I choose to accept that I also have some responsibility in the matter.
As for the virtuous-native argument, I don't buy that either. For one reason: population growth. A human civilization can never be sustainable unless its population is stable. It's just basic ecology. Well, AFAIK, there is no premodern human society that has mastered this. Their populations are all increasing, just from a lower baseline, since they haven't adopted farming yet. Their impacts may be lower because the absolute numbers are lower, but the trajectory is exactly the same. I know that's not a popular opinion among the race-obsessed modern American left, but I'm a universalist so that's how I see it. The color of people's skin does not exempt them from responsibility. We're all humans, we're all implicated in this endeavor.
Jared Diamond's book Collapse contains an anecdote which is a possible caveat. Apparently some of the premodern societies of the New Guinea Highlands have, in fact, mastered birth control and so managed to stabilize their populations. But AFAIK this is very much an exception. Even if one believes that premodern society - without proper healthcare, mostly patriarchal, often violent - is superior to ours, one still has to contend with the population issue. Humans in my view are all the same. We all want the same thing, we're just progressing at different speeds towards the same reckoning.
That is such BS. I'm already living in a neighborhood with higher density with easy access to public transportation by both bus and subway, buying my food as locally as possible by going to local markets and mongers, reducing my meat consumption, trying to repair everything I own as much as possible instead of disposing and buying new an trying to keep my things to last as long as I can, reducing my energy consumption, trying to avoid plastics, composting, recycling, you name it. But I'm still limited by what's available out there that is being sold by big ass companies who only care about profit.
I'm sick and tired of putting the onus of making all the sacrifices on us, the working class, while rich assholes and companies are contributing more to pollution and global warming than anyone else. I really don't care bout you accusing me of not doing enough. You're basically defending companies and billionaires.
Population growth has never been so rapid. We were never supposed to grow this fast. Again this is a modern phenomena. This has never happened until the 1700s, which is around the time that colonization was in full swing. Then modern medicine came along. Before that, population growth was pretty stable. So your argument doesn't stand.
And why do you think that modern capitalist government don't want to stop population growth and keep complaining about low birthrates? They want more people so they can have more workers, and more workers means lower wages, lower wages means more profits! They're creating this environment where life become a rat race.
I'm not accusing you, I'm accusing us. Big difference. If you're doing your bit, that's great. Imagine how different things would look if everybody cared as much as you. Unfortunately they don't. Presumably you'll say they have busy lives, they're exploited by their capitalist bosses etc etc, so it's not their fault. All I see is a lot people saying "it's not their fault", "it's not our fault", "it's not my fault".
But "stable" population growth does not exist, by definition. It's no different from the economic variety: even 1% is exponential and will therefore prove unsustainable, since the ecosystem has not changed in size. And the record is clear. over and over, premodern civilizations have exceeded the carrying capacity of their environments and collapsed. The Amazon has repeatedly been farmed by humans whose numbers then crashed, allowing the forest to regrow. The Maya were already hitting the wall when the European colonists arrived. Same everywhere: Africa, the Pacific, and it will happen to all the supposedly harmonious societies you mention. There's nothing specially virtuous about them.
I think we can pick one story and show one thing, and then another one to show another thing. Or hell, pick the first one again to say something different than the first time.
History is a malleable thing, and what you base your argument on is a version of it, not sure it's the truth.
But the gist of what you are saying is that any people would have done what White folks did. Just give them time.
You know, I don't believe that. White folks were exceptionally OK with genocide, we always have been. Intergenerational traum, I guess, from the millenias of tragedy of the Continent.
To presume that our white trajectory is the necessary trajectory for ALL PEOPLES, because 'ecology' (which is a scholarly discipline defined by who, may I ask) is.... BONKERS.
I'm sorry, I am sure you are bright and you seem well-read and intelligent but the idea you propose as an infallibility for all humans is completely and utterly bonkers.
The concept of "white folks" is entirely unscientific, it's an American cultural construction.
But yes, I am indeed saying that we just need to give other cultures time and we will all end up at the same destination. I don't essentialize humans by their arbitrary racial characteristics.